Obama and the U.S.' Oil Addiction

With the Middle East shocked by social turbulences and nuclear energy being challenged by the debacle with an atomic reactor in Fukushima, the United States will remember, in a few days, April 20, the date of its greatest environmental disaster: the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform and the enormous spill of petrol to the Gulf of Mexico. In this disturbing situation, President Barack Obama outlined his policies toward energy in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington last week. He highlighted two main goals: Reduce oil imports by one-third by 2025 and generate 80 percent of U.S. energy from clean sources — that is to say, the ones which emit the bare minimum amount of gases that produce the greenhouse effect — by 2035.

In the U.S., like the rest of the world, the main and most profitable inversion is the one that is intended to save money and increase efficiency. In this sense, Obama has already met with big distributing enterprises to point out the need to improve the performance of their huge fleets of vehicles. In fact, the government will set even stricter saving requirements for both heavy vehicles and cars. They will also create new stimuli for renewable energies such as eolic, solar and geothermic, which is the most important in the country. For some time the possibility of building fast trains in the most densely populated regions has been discussed.

The U.S. reached its highest peak of oil production in the early ‘70s. Since then, consumption continues to grow while production falls. With less than five percent of the world’s population, Americans consume around a fourth of all the petrol in the world. In 1973 President Nixon started his “Project Independence” destined to guarantee the self sufficiency in a few years. Afterward, subsequent North American presidents reaffirmed their will to end with oil addiction.

But one after another left the office with even bigger use of oil even than their predecessor. After Nixon, Ronald Reagan stated the need to develop new technologies and a greater independence from imported oil. After that, George H.W. Bush pointed out that “it is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.” Bill Clinton, on the other hand, said, “We have got to do something about our energy strategy. Because if we permit the climate to continue to warm at an unsustainable rate, and if we keep on doing what we’re doing until we’re out of oil and we haven’t made the transition, then it’s inconceivable to me that our children and grandchildren will be able to maintain the American way of life and that the world won’t be much fuller of resource-based wars of all kinds.” George W. Bush postulated that the U.S. had to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

In 2010 Obama said that “for decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.” It remains to be seen if the initiatives announced by the White House will be accomplished.